2 MORE WEEKS!

School work is crazy right now. To even find the time right now to blog about this is amazing to me. It hasn't been essays that's been keeping me busy (though I still get about 2-3 of them which is 1-2 less of them each week), but rather a whole line of projects. I have 4 projects to finish up this weekend and present next week. A video for Visual Culture, a web page for Intro to internet, A game mod for Game design, and a wiki presentation for Media foundation. Other than that, I have 2 proposals to write up to get into the game culture program and for applying into independent studies this summer. I have a final essay to write for Media foundations after presentations and one final for History of Contemporary Art on thursday of finals week. To top off all the stress of homework and presentations, I need to find people to sublet my apartment for the summer. I did find 2 friends who were going to sublet, but then both suddenly today say they found an alternative and don't need to anymore. I feel like just curling up into a ball in a corner and just complain for a good hour (or get angry) but I don't even have time for that! LOL.

Not everything is incredibly bad with life and school though. I've been able to hang out with friends once in while and still go out to my clubs. I'm going to semi this saturday for Tomo no Kai, though I'm mainly going to hang out with friends and eating (not so good with dancing...).

Over the quarter, I tried out "Prinny: Can I really be the hero?" on PSP.

This game is, how should I put it....EVIL!  The game looks somewhat childish or sketchy; however, it has an incredible gameplay structure, humorous dialogue, and a deviously design to keep you playing despite the amount of times you die in the game.  The levels are somewhat short, but extremely difficult as your progress.  You start the game with 1000 lives!!!  At first, I was like "why do you need so many lives for a platform game?"  After playing about 5 mins, 1000 lives didn't seem enough to beat the whole game.  So all in all, it's a good game.  It teases you because you know you can beat it, but you have to keep learning from your mistakes.

Going back to school stuff, I think one of the most frustrating things I faced in the past week was my 2nd project and 3rd project for Visual Culture.  I worked on my 2nd project (Animation and Mechanical movement - posted up on Facebook) until late night before it was due and hoped it was something interesting for the class.  As the first 2-3 people presented, people clapped and made some comments and simple critiques.  After I presented mines, the whole classroom was silent.  I was so confused as to why no one responded, and when the finally did, they didn't understand the concept or didn't like how it was so long.  I even asked a few friends what they thought and they either said it was too long or didn't really show animation.  I was sad, but at the same time really glad my friends stepped up to be honest with me so that I can make the next project even better.  Our final project is a video that had a narrative.  Again, my ideas went wild and ended up being longer than the prompt's guidelines.  This time; however, I am definately going to make it fun for everyone.  I asked for 7 of my friends in the class for help.  5 of them were able to help me directly and 2 of them will help me indirectly as part of the project.  So what happened was that I couldn't get everyone on the same day to film for the project.  So I decided to film each person individually.  Then I couldn't find a camcorder, and finally checked out a Hard-drive camcorder from the science library.  All was well until I got to export the clips onto my computer and realized that the video editor couldn't read the clips.  I tried downloading codecs, converters, and working on different machines and found no real way to edit my video.  I tried many methods for 6 hours one night before giving up.  Today, just now, I tried it on my Vista side's window's movie maker, and it worked.  For once, Vista has saved my butt and allowed me to work on my project.  Let's just hope I don't run into any more problems....

Mid-terms and school

I'm making another short rant for the month of April.  Time is so limited and valuable now.  School, sleep, clubs, homework, downtime, lab/discussions, everything takes up time.  I'm averaging about 3-4 essays a week and about 2-3 reading assignments a week (sometimes more).  Then every 3 weeks, I have 2 projects to work on with the work on top of that.  I still go to all my club meetings and discuss on what I need to do for Videogame Development Club and Language Exchange Program.  I still keep up the work for those two clubs too.  Going to Tomo no Kai is my downtime (just to chillax and hang-out).  I'm taking Kendo and Iaido this quarter, but I skip wednesday's iaido practice since I have a class that conflicts time with it.  With all these going on, I fell behind in the class I like the most and the one I like the least: Game Design (World of Warcraft Class) and History of Contemporary Art respectively.  This weekend, I have a lot of work again, but I'm trying to catch up on both those classes.  I recieved my first Mid-term, which is a take home Essay that's 4-6 pages long for my History of Contemporary Art class.  That class is just torture to all the studio arts students of UC Irvine.  It's dead boring, hard to follow, and feels very useless as part of our academics.

But enough of the depressing stuff.  Times are tough now for everyone, especially with this "swine flu" talk going around the world.  It's really scary to hear about such things when they're so close to you, becuse you don't know what's going to happen but know it's going to be bad if it DOES happen.  Still, I've been trying my best to enjoy life if possible throughout these past 5 weeks.  I tried out the Japanese version of Phantasy Star Zero for the Nintendo DS and fell in love with the Opening song "Makenai Kokoro" sung by young and talented Okumura Hatsune (奥村初音) who is also very pretty! XD  But really, she started writing her own music around the age of 10, has done a few dramas, and has an incredibly beautiful singing voice.  I've never heard of her before actually, and I thought her voice was familiar when I first heard the song.  Anyways, the game so far has a great balance between action and story since Phantasy Star Online (PSO) was more about action and Phantasy Star Universe (PSU) was more about story.  It meets halfway between the two and makes it a enjoyable game for both PSO and PSU players as well as new players.  The controls are more similar to PSO than PSU but lacks the amount of feature customization when creating a character.  It's not that bad as you get to choose from a good amount (more than Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and Shining Soul).  The graphics are great for a Nintendo DS, and the gameplay is just as fun as the past Phantasy Star games.  The sound effects of the game is a bit harder to judge since they sound very old-computer-ish like sounds, but it makes it funny and reminiscents old retro games.  The controls are a little hard to get used to, but new features in the game make it a new experience for returning fans and new ones (you can actually dodge and block now!!!)  Still, the story is told  by short clips of video and mostly reading, so I wasn't able to read the dialogue very well when going through the intro.  The good thing was I could read the names of the items and weapons that I picked up.  I can't wait for this game to come out in America, I'm so going to buy it so I could play online!!!

[Just a funny video I watched last quarter.]

I don't want to continue too long, but here's some other short rants:

World of Warcraft: I'm falling behind in my class like I said before, but I'm (sorta) having fun.  I have a Druid at level 15 (when everyone else is level 30) for my class and I started a Hunter not too long ago but don't have time to play it.  I also want to play a rogue, but I don't know if I have the time to do so.  I really hope I catch up with the class so I could group/instance/raid with them.

Puzzle Quest Galactrix: I tried it out and it's different from Puzzle Quest: Challange of the Warlords.  It's easier to create combos, but it's also more unexpected of what's going to happen next.  Fun game, not sure how often I'll get to play it though.

Space Siege: Wow, I can't believe I didn't play this earlier.  The game mechanics is actually really fun and more action than Dungeon Siege.  Along with being able to have more control over attacking and dodging, not having to worry about misc. items keeps the game going without having to constantly sort through my equipments.  I should really play this through LAN with someone, I think it's worth it.  One thing that does bug me is getting used to the controls the first time playing it.

-Well, I have about 30 minutes before I go to my Tomo no Kai meeting, so I think I'm going to play WoW for just a moment.  We're going to Karaoke tonight, so it should be fun (hopefully).